Comment by bambax | Hacker News Reader

Comment by bambax | Hacker News Reader

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> Google and Youtube search are heavily censored, for example if you open Youtube and type "JRE alex" then Alex Jones will be the last suggestion despite his episode having the most views

This is provably untrue. I just searched YT for "JRE Alex" and the first three results are clips from the "JRE" show (I didn't know what that acronym was before now) featuring Alex Jones [0].

Why are people repeating these complotist theories when it takes five seconds to disprove them.

Also, even if it was true (which it isn't), it still wouldn't be censoring. Censoring would mean not returning results when a match exist -- not massaging the SERP. It would also mean not publishing clips from said "censored" content on Google's own video platform, where they have millions of views.

In France there is a controversial (to say the least) comedian, Dieudonné, a holocaust denier and an anti-semite. He's heavily censored by the French government who regularly bans his shows; but canceling his YT channel happened only recently, after a lot of interventions by the state and other non-governmental agencies.

It's been my experience that Google is quite resistant to censoring, in general.

[0] Here are the top three results on YT for "JRE Alex":

    Alex Jones - God Doesn't Know Where He Came From | Joe Rogan
    2.6M views 3 years ago
    JRE Clips
    Taken from Joe Rogan Experience #1255 w/Alex Jones: https://youtu.be/-5yh2HcIlkU.
    3:43:03

    Joe Rogan Experience #911 - Alex Jones & Eddie Bravo
    13M views Streamed 5 years ago
    PowerfulJRE
    Alex Jones is a radio show host, filmmaker, writer, and conspiracy theorist. Eddie Bravo is a jiujitsu black belt, music producer, and ...
    3:11:09

    Joe Rogan Experience #1555 - Alex Jones & Tim Dillon
    23M views 1 year ago
    PowerfulJRE
    Tim Dillon is a standup comedian, actor, and host of the Tim Dillon Show. Alex Jones is a filmmaker, writer, and host of the Alex ...

>This is provably untrue

I'm not talking about when you click search (even though that itself is censored), I talk about when you're writing on the search bar and see the suggestions in the dropdown, and that isn't untrue for me at all since I verified that it still was there before writing my comment.

So the result is still accessible through the search, but you would want it "suggested"?

You claim you want to see Alex Jones because you want to be challenged in your opinions, but is that possible that SUGGESTING Alex Jones is actually causing harm to many people? It might not cause you harm, but if we suggest it to people that might not have looked for it otherwise, we are sending people down the line of starting to harass parents of victims. It seems clear to me why it's not suggested. Perhaps for you it doesn't matter, it' just to "challenge" your views. Obviously, your kid wasn't shot in a school and you don't have people calling you every hour of the day to tell you you're a criminal that just made it up and have random people going to your house and fire at your house.

Perhaps your personal freedom must stop when it starts causing violence.

Again.. those videos are still there in the search results, just the suggested terms are not there.

I'm not the parent poster, and this is just a reaction to the specific wording of "causing violence", not an attack on your beliefs or anything.

In my opinion, showing a suggestion in a drop-down box in a YT search field with "Alex Jones" in it does not equate to "causing violence". I get your point about some people (such as parents of Sandy Hook victims) being caused harm just by seeing his name, but equating that to "causing violence" just waters down the term. I lost a parent to leukemia years ago and seeing references to the disease causes me slight bits of "harm". I wouldn't even call it that, though maybe I would have directly after they died. It's not "violence" though, because that presupposes a type of deliberate one-on-one physical harm that even the most well-engineered drop-down menu can be expected to achieve. It's also not something I would expect the developers at YouTube to be working hard to shield me from.

In my opinion, personal freedom needs a much higher bar before it can be restricted than seeing personal names in drop-down menus in search boxes. I get that this sentiment is going the way of the dinosaurs these days, but I at least still believe in it.

> Perhaps your personal freedom must stop when it starts causing violence.

Just about everyone agrees that personal freedom does not extend to causing violence. The difficult bit is what constitutes 'causing'.

>Now those episodes have been controversial, and I only bring them up because it's the example that came to my head (before someone misses the whole point and starts looking at the finger)

As you can see in my initial post.. or maybe you don't, I avoid talking about things like this on HN because most people here are smart enough to look between the lines but some only pretend to look at the finger to win an argument, well..

I was talking about censorship, and I don't "want" or "not want" Alex Jones to be suggested, and I won't pretend to tell a private company how to do their business, so I just stopped using Youtube and most other social media.

>Perhaps your personal freedom must stop when it starts causing violence. Of course if you call for violence on others, but if I say that people of party X are liars, then my fans start attacking them on the street, am I causing harm or are my fans the ones who cause the harm? If it's my fault then most politicians call each other liars and criminals every other week...

Also about the children thing I'm not up to date with it, but I know he said Sandy Hook was fake and something happened (I'm not American), but the guy says lots of crazy stuff and always has, it's still not a reason to censor anyone.

I doubt you'll understand how small steps like this can lead to somethings that in hindsight we see as catastrophic, but a system (like soviet russia or nazi germany) is built step by step, today we censor you, tomorrow we deepfake the president's face and post it on twitter, very soon we throw you in a concentration camp.

>but is that possible that SUGGESTING Alex Jones is actually causing harm to many people?

There are videos of kids challenging each other to balance on the rooftop of a skyscraper, videos of Islamic priests calling for the death of unbelievers, ads for fast-food with a shit ton of sugar and fat, videos on how to make high powered infrared lasers that can blind someone without even being visible to the naked eye, videos of home made guns, etc... and they all get suggested in the search bar once you type in a few words.

Other thoughts:

Also an important thing to note is that the Alex Jones lies (that he maybe believed since he's not 100% in there) on Sandy Hook resulted in zero deaths. Mainstream media and CIA misinformation on weapons of mass destruction resulted in 1 million+ innocent Iraqis dying in "Operation Iraqi Freedom" yet no one has ever tried to ban them from anything, are those Iraqi kids just not that important? Are they less than us because they're not white?

Alex Jones and Johnny Depp gets publicly televised trials but none for Ghislaine Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein, all the "terrorist suspects" in Guantanamo, Julian Assange, and so on and so forth

I never would have thought that in the 21th century in the first world I'd be arguing FOR freedom of speech while being talked down to as the bad guy.

JRE Alex Jones appears as my first suggestion as soon as I type "JRE Al". "JRE Robert" initially didn't show Robert Malone, but I didn't know who he was, and after I searched his name, his Joe Rogan podcast appeared as a suggestion. Honestly, it sounds like you're coming into this with a huge preconceived notion that Google goes out of the way to mildly inconvenience the far right. If you really care about "conservative censorship", ask your Republican representatives to make Google a common carrier instead of virtue signalling about how bad big tech is to score cheap political points.

>Honestly, it sounds like you're coming into this with a huge preconceived notion that Google goes out of the way to mildly inconvenience the far right.

If you think any tech company doesn't do this then you've been living under a rock for the past 5 years. All you have to do is look for some videos or upload one yourself about certain subjects and see.

>If you really care about "conservative censorship", ask your Republican representatives to make Google a common carrier instead of virtue signaling about how bad big tech is to score cheap political points.

I'm not American, and don't care about conservatives or democrats, and the only politician I admire is Bernie Sanders, but we all know he'll never win because (even though he's on the left), he's a good man. I just used to admire the freedoms you guys had that's all, how Nixon had to resign because of Watergate, meanwhile Clinton did worse to Sanders and no one even cared, Biden's daughter's journal got out where she describes weird things and no one cares, his son being a crackhead and no one cares, imagine if Trump's son got pictures of him doing crack and tell me how you think the media would have reacted.

The ideal world would be libertarian, do whatever you want without hurting others, a few decades ago it seemed like the world was moving towards this direction but not anymore, it doesn't matter anyways since humans have the same DNA we did 100 years ago so we'll probably repeat the same mistakes over and over again, we seem to organize in systems that eventually move towards violence and oppression, and people in 100 years from now will ask the same question we ask about "how could X people allow Y to get into power".

None of this will ever change until maybe we figure out a way to transcend our genetic encoding or evolve out of our current situation (which is unlikely to happen since usually the bad people are the ones who survive our wars, famines and dictatorships).

This is also provably untrue.

The YT search box suggests "JRE Alex Jones" for "JRE alex" not once but twice, once in the second position and once in the 9th position as "JRE Alex Jones Returns".

Conspirationists used to infer evil motives behind random events. That itself was bad enough. But now they are inventing new facts entirely, that never existed, or pretend things that did happen in plain sight didn't. (Such as... Alex Jones and Sandy Hooks).

It's a sorry state of affairs.

Everyone gets different search results. Suppressing content is a form of censorship. You're just out of the loop. Silicon valley is left wing. Anyone paying attention can see they're using these platforms to enact social change. What do you think this whole Elon/Twitter thing was about?

> What do you think this whole Elon/Twitter thing was about?

Interesting that the first version of your comment didn't include that; you added it as an afterthought.

I don't know what you think "this whole Elon/Twitter thing" is about. What I think is, it's about Musk being bored and saying one thing one day, and another another day, and having armies of lawyers scrambling around to clean up the mess he makes. Musk hates lawyers; I think he enjoys giving them unwinnable cases.

But do you think Musk is trying to fight "left wing censorship"? Or was? (since he doesn't want to buy Twitter anymore).

Please share your opinions or insights, because we can't guess what's on your mind.

You didn't acknowledge your lack of understanding about search results. The algorithm suppresses results based on location data. Ranking is based on your prior search history. Censorship varies by country. There is no point in continuing discussion when you are ignoring my points entirely.

>I don't know what you think "this whole Elon/Twitter thing" is about. What I think is, it's about Musk being bored and saying one thing one day, and another another day, and having armies of lawyers scrambling around to clean up the mess he makes. Musk hates lawyers; I think he enjoys giving them unwinnable cases.

>But do you think Musk is trying to fight "left wing censorship"? Or was? (since he doesn't want to buy Twitter anymore).

You probably don't see the bias in what you say but if I say that say some left wing tech guy did something to push his agenda you'll probably say "that's conspiracy theory" then you go on and say the exact same thing about Elon, sure he probably doesn't care about it that much as to spend 44 billion $ to try and fix it, but he's been talking about it for a very long time, if you see some of his interviews from 2018 where he speaks about AI (in that context he means something different) he gives the example of the emergent system that's made from Twitter and its users becoming by itself an entity with its own motives, etc. (imagine the brain where each neuron is a used and the rules between their communication is twitter, the neurons can't conceptualize what the brain wants or means or tries to do, but as a whole it's something more than its components).

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